


every line in your palm

by The_Wavesinger



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M, Ghosts, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-14
Updated: 2019-02-14
Packaged: 2019-10-23 20:12:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17690141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Wavesinger/pseuds/The_Wavesinger
Summary: Leia and Luke, after his death.





	every line in your palm

**Author's Note:**

  * For [yujacheong](https://archiveofourown.org/users/yujacheong/gifts).



> The title is from Dire Straits' Brothers in Arms.

She packs her grief away, stores it carefully in a place where she can find it later (an art she’s had the long years of practice it takes to truly master something in). Then she gives Rey the co-ordinates to the last safe place she has left: the most secretive hideout of the Alderaanian royal family, a small facility in an unnamed system, untraceable and unfindable except up close in a place where no-one would chose to look.

 

***

 

There is a list of allies she needs to reach out to, the very last of last resorts. Strings held together by favors long-owed and brief handshakes and promises at formal events.

Instead, she’s sitting in a sparse white room, tossing the dice in her hand. Heads, she loses. Tails, he wins.

Somehow, she’s not surprised when he turns up. She’s known about Force ghosts for a long, long time, and she knows her brother. She knows the extend of her power, and she only says, “Luke.”

“Leia.”

He looks—good. Not young, still the same age he was when he died, but lighter. He bends down to kiss Leia—

And his lips pass right through hers. There’s no sensation at all.

Leia suddenly wants to cry again. Instead, the two of them sit in silence, side-by-side, until Leia’s comm chirps. The moment she picks it up, Luke disappears.

 

***

 

“I miss you,” she says, the next time Luke appears. It’s been two days, and a lifetime. Then, “I miss holding you. I miss your body.”

“I’m sorry.”

And Luke _is_ sorry, she knows, for many things. But—“You’re not sorry. Not for dying.”

He smiles at her, brief, faint. “No I’m not. Not really.”

It had to be done, she knows that. In his place, she would have made the same choice, for herself and for Ben. _Has_ made the same choice. They can’t bring himself to kill (not destroy, they’ve done the destruction part well enough between them) this child of their flesh and blood and knowledge, she and Han and Luke, and the galaxy is paying the price for that. Rey is paying the price for that, and is going to keep praying the price for that.

Something of her thoughts must be caught in her expression, because Luke comes and stands next to her. It’s not enough, but it’s more than she thought she’d have.

 

***

 

Almost everyone is asleep, except the people they have watching the security feeds on the night shift. Leia can’t sleep, though, so she’s pulled out maps and notes, going over information she already knows.

It all adds up to one thing: they can’t defeat the Empi—the First Order. Not like this. Not without the firepower they lost. Not without the allies who were wiped out. Leaning on the people they still have left to make an army is not an option.

She knows what she has to do. Knows what she has to ask. It’s going to be a long, slow road. “It was so much easier when we were kids,” Leia says aloud. “I don’t know how Mon did this. I don’t know if I can.”

Luke pops into view, the way she’d known he would. “You ask them, and wait for their answer.”

Leia closes her eyes. “That’s easy for _you_ to say.” The moment she says it, she wants to take it back. The old bitterness still simmers. It shouldn’t have surprised her, that part of herself, that anger, but it does. She’d thought that she’d let that go before he died.

“I’m sorry,” Luke says again.

Leia hates his apologies, hates that he’s apologizing again for something that should be past between them, hates that the need for apologies exists. “I don’t want to think about it right now,” she says, instead of voicing all those unsaid things. “I need—I need more people. I need a spy network. I need more Jedi.”

“You don’t have any Jedi,” Luke says quietly. He’s sitting next to her, now, and she doesn’t understand how he can sit but not touch her. Just another thing about the Force she doesn’t understand, doesn’t want to understand. “The Jedi are dead.”

“There’s still Rey.” Leia dares him to contradict her, dares him to shatter even that hope.

Luke’s lips thin, but he doesn’t say anything. “If there’s Rey, _you_ can—”

“No. We talked about this.” And oh, Leia remembers that night, and the talk that had followed the talk, his lips against her, bodies pressed together. The two of them becoming one, the way they were always meant to be. “I am who I am, and the Force is part of me, but I’m not a Jedi.”

Luke bows his head, and presses her hand against hers. It passes right through, of course, but—

But. There is a flutter of sensation. Leia carefully doesn’t think about it, because she can’t. She just allows herself to _feel_.

“Luke,” she says, after a silence that stretches on for eternity. “Talk to Rey. Please?”

It makes her worse than a coward to ask that of him, but he nods his acquiescence “I will.”

 

***

 

The next time Luke comes to her, and the next time, and the next time again, she’s alone in her room. And they still don’t touch, can’t touch.

Leia sends off Poe, then Finn, then Rose, then Rey. And still Luke keeps coming.

Until at last Luke tells her, when he appears, “It’s time.”

“Oh.” Leia closes her eyes for a moment. She knows what she has to do. She knows her duty, knows the long years of duty stretching ahead, knows also the explosive moment she’s facing. She’s done this before, and it makes her bones ache to think of it.

“I can’t promise that this’ll never happen again, Leia,” Luke says. He does that, now, reads her thoughts almost before they’ve formed. Leia’s found she doesn’t mind. She’s old, and tired of being alone.

“I don’t want you to.” More promises Luke won’t be able to keep, more things that’ll weigh him down even in death. “Just—kiss me, please?”

And he does kiss her. And—

She _feels_ it.

Not the passion she can see him pouring into the kiss, not the fire and love and desperation and all the things they’ve never said. But she still feels his lips against hers, a light a brush as it may be, and that’s enough.

She squares her shoulders and marches off to war.


End file.
